CBS News abruptly withdrew a “60 Minutes” segment on Sunday evening that featured Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration speaking on their treatment at a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.
CBS justified the decision by saying the segment “needed more reporting.” Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the story, rejected that claim, telling colleagues in an internal memo that the story was shelved for “political” purposes, as reported by the New York Times.
“The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship,” Alfonsi said. “We are trading 50 years of ‘Gold Standard’ for a single week of political quiet.”
Alfonsi said that the decision to pull the segment came from editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who Alfonsi said “spiked our story.”
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi said. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2025-12-22T03:37:37.741Z
Weiss had requested numerous changes to the segment, according to the New York Times. For one, she suggested a new interview with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has been responsible for much of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, including air strikes in the Caribbean.
She also took issue with the term “migrants” used to describe the men deported to CECOT, the maximum security prison in El Salvador, since the men were not in the U.S. legally. Weiss defended her decision, saying the story “wasn’t ready.”
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“The only newsroom I’m interested in running is one in which we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters with respect, and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues,” Weiss told a CNN reporter. “Anything else is absolutely unacceptable.”
Alfonsi alleged that Weiss’s decision stemmed from a lack of political approval from the Trump administration. She said in her memo that numerous departments were contacted for comment on the segment’s removal.
“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi said.
